The Internet is My Religion. Ccip.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Creating_Networked_Cities_FINAL.pdf. For Public Colleges, the Best Tuition Is No Tuition - Commentary. By Robert Samuels In the 1960s, only a small percentage of Finnish students completed high school, and Finland ranked in the middle of developed countries on test scores. Forty years later, Finland had one of the highest percentages of high-school graduates in the world, and its students had the highest test scores in math and science. Many people have asked how Finland achieved this transformation, and how we can apply this model to other systems of education.
According to Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, there were five major components to Finland's success: (1) all education became public and free; (2) teachers became well compensated and highly trained; (3) education became interactive and experienced-based; (4) students at an early age received individual attention; and (5) in high school, students were able to choose a vocational track or an academic track.
The first step is to calculate how much it would cost to make all public higher education free in the United States. The mobile government worker: Excerpt from “Gov on the go” There’s no question that many public officials recognize the benefits of mobile. A 2011 survey of state government CIOs by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) found that 58 percent of them consider mobile devices and apps either essential or a high priority for government. Public workers are even more gung-ho. As NASCIO puts it, “Even when mobile devices and apps are a priority, states struggle to keep up with state employee pressures to allow them to use personal mobile devices.”29 Workers recognize that mobile technology allows them to do their jobs better.
As the Center for Digital Government writes, To illustrate the benefits of mobile technology for government employees, we examine three different types of workers who spend much of their time in the field: human services caseworkers, emergency responders, and law enforcement officers. Five ways mobile can improve the productivity of government workers Health and human services (HHS) caseworkers. How Edmonton Is Finding Value in Its Waste Stream.
A growing volume of waste has long been viewed as a natural consequence of industrializing society. Unfortunately, we also have grown accustomed to disposing of most of what touches our lives, resulting in the challenge of managing vast quantities of municipal waste. Edmonton, Alberta, facing the familiar problem of dwindling landfill capacity, has set what many might consider an impossible goal: diverting 90 percent of its waste from its landfills. As much of a stretch as that might seem, Edmonton already had a diversion rate of 60 percent, thanks in large part to a major composting facility completed in 2001 -- an already enviable figure in a province with an average residential waste-diversion rate of 29 percent. This column appears in our monthly Infrastructure e-newsletter. But to get to 90 percent, Edmonton's leaders knew that they would need to go beyond traditional approaches.
They started by getting input from residents over a period of many months. What Happens When a Town Puts People Before Cars? - Sarah Goodyear. Nearly three years ago, a Minnesota man named Charles Marohn published a piece called "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer" on the blog of his not-for-profit organization, Strong Towns. In it, he describes the priorities that he learned in his training as an engineer: first comes speed; then traffic volume; then safety; then cost. Following those principles, Marohn was designing wider, faster roads to cut through the hearts of American towns. He discovered that the people in those towns often pushed back, asking why trees and sidewalk space had to be sacrificed in order to widen the road, and how their children could possibly be safer with cars whizzing by at top speed. Then, unlike many engineers, he started thinking about the human consequences of what he was doing: In retrospect I understand that this was utter insanity.
Wider, faster, treeless roads not only ruin our public places, they kill people. That’s exactly what the village of Hamburg, in upstate New York, has done. ‘A person is intelligent, but people are stupid’ Summary Why a misinformed public is a risk to democracy, and a public policy issue Some of you may have seen the report by Ipsos Mori and Kings College London. (Click here if you haven’t – their top ten is eye-watering). The first thing I want to start with is a word of caution. Just because the headlines show the things tabloids scream about are over-exaggerated does not automatically mean liberal-lefties have got everything right – if only the masses would listen. What patterns emerge from those headlines? Actually, it’s worth looking through the tables. From the headlines, you could say that the public believes that more bad stuff is happening than actual bad stuff happens. Manufacturing consent I stumbled across this snippet from a very long digital video from ages ago – which refers to a book from the 1920s.
Availability & accessibility of information – & knowing where that info isKnowing how to use/interpret said informationHaving the time to interpret said information The challenge? How to Humble a Wing Nut. There is no standard definition of the all-important term “wing nut,” so let’s provide one. A wing nut is someone who has a dogmatic commitment to an extreme political view (“wing”) that is false and at least a bit crazy (“nut”). A wing nut might believe that George W. Bush is a fascist, that Barack Obama is a socialist, that big banks run the Department of the Treasury or that the U.S. intervened in Libya because of oil.
About Cass R Sunstein» Cass R. Sunstein, the former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is ... When wing nuts encounter people with whom they disagree, they immediately impugn their opponents’ motivations. Wing nuts have a lot of fellow travelers -- people who don’t fit the definition, yet who are similarly dogmatic and whose views, though not really crazy, aren’t exactly evidence-based. The good news is that wing nuts usually don’t matter. Stunning Conclusion The study came in four stages. The results were stunning. (Cass R. Democracy | AndrewKurjata.ca. Democracy Posted on 16 May 2013 “Just a friendly reminder that democracy isn’t simply picking one side to be in charge every four years. It’s a process that happens every day in a variety of forums and ways.” I wrote that on Facebook yesterday, and a shorter version on Twitter.
As of now it has 20-odd likes and 4 shares (plus a number of retweets), which for me is a pretty high number for a status update. It seems to be resonating. At the risk of destroying that resonance, here is an attempt to expand on the thoughts going through my mind when I posted it, the day after British Columbia’s provincial election. First of all, if you are among the people who were threatening to leave if your choice of party didn’t form government, you might as well go ahead and do it now. Now that that’s out of the way, this is for the rest of you. At its simplest, democracy is rule by the people. There’s lots of ways to make your voice heard. I’m not saying any of this is easy. OK, back to everyone. How Austerity Kills. Because the Italian government’s austerity budget had raised the retirement age, Mr. Dionisi, a former construction worker, became one of Italy’s esodati (exiled ones) — older workers plunged into poverty without a safety net.
On April 5, he and his wife left a note on a neighbor’s car asking for forgiveness, then hanged themselves in a storage closet at home. When Ms. Sopranzi’s brother, Giuseppe Sopranzi, 73, heard the news, he drowned himself in the Adriatic. The correlation between unemployment and suicide has been observed since the 19th century. People looking for work are about twice as likely to end their lives as those who have jobs. In the United States, the suicide rate, which had slowly risen since 2000, jumped during and after the 2007-9 recession. If suicides were an unavoidable consequence of economic downturns, this would just be another story about the human toll of the Great Recession.
At one extreme is Greece, which is in the middle of a public health disaster. How to Be a Citizen Placemaker: Think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper. This is the third of a three-part series on transformative Placemaking. To read part one, click here. To read part two, click here. With some temporary materials, a roadway can become a bocce ball court, and a street can become a great place / Photo: PPS Imagine that you live in a truly vibrant place: the bustling neighborhood of every Placemaker’s dreams. Now, here’s the million dollar question: in that vision, what are you doing to add to that bustle? If vibrancy is people, and citizenship is creative, it follows that the more that citizens feel they are able to contribute to their public spaces, the more vibrant their communities will be.
“There is an undeniable thing that each resident brings to the table,” says Katherine Loflin, who led Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community study. “There is an undeniable thing that each resident brings to the table…It has to do with the openness and feeling of the place.” / Photo: PPS Getting Started: How You Can Make a Place Great Right Away. Public servants need to stand up to government: Page. OTTAWA – Kevin Page made a name for himself by holding politicians to account, but now he’s calling out fellow public servants, urging them to stand up for transparency, scrutiny and good research. The former Parliamentary Budget Officer slammed the country’s top bureaucrats for weak leadership that has allowed paralyzing fear to spread throughout the public service and may leave Canada with irreversible scars.
With nearly three decades of public service under his belt, Page said he has never seen people so afraid – a fear that stops them from doing research that may contradict the current government’s ideology. “We have all these big issues. We have climate change issues, aging issues, income disparity issues,” he said at a panel discussion on Thursday. Instead, Page said public servants have been cowed into silence, which may fuel a loss of faith in government among Canadians. “People stop trusting the institution,” he said. The natural reaction, says Page, was disappointment. 2012 03 04 Democracy Watch OIPLtr Feb20.13 With Attachment. Home - The Social Progress Imperative.